Un-hacking Intellectual Industry: Academia, Tech, & the Myth of Detoxification
Radar is the capacity to pick up signals.
Reality Selection is the skill for recognizing distinctions between different types of signals.
Healing is the ability to recognize and affirm the source of a given signal.
—Antero Alli, Angel Tech, p199
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What a horror it would have been if the world was real; because if the world was real it would be immortal.
—from Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
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I wrote last of the unavoidable reality of pain, and pain’s ostensible role in the development of a certain spiritual outlook. The first time I agreed to attend therapy was in the first year of my PhD program, and only due to a partner’s desperate ultimatum. I had been unwell, possibly insane, on and off for 18 months. I did not think I was doing any worse than any of my friends; but I was unwilling to sacrifice my relationship to denial.
I was very lucky that this particular therapist took the university health insurance. The receptionist apologized that all the women were booked up, and so “only a man” was available on the schedule; I did not mind, imagining I could charm him. I was very lucky in connecting with an addiction specialist who was not only immune to my self-imagined charm, but who point-blank refused to let me talk about my past. “I’m your working-class therapist,” he would often remind me when I got whiny. “I’m a thug when it comes to retraining your nervous system.”
Last spring, three years into working together, he suggested I “use pain as a way of making a new arrangement.” Following John Grinder (founder of NLP), he described how I might take my symptoms and recognize them as unconscious signals. “Take ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ completely out of it,” he says. “We have to get your unconscious on board with all of the conscious things you’ve been working on so far. Anyway—and you’re not gonna like this, being an academic and all that—Grinder does not even recognize mind. If you can change something at the state level, then it doesn’t matter what you believe. What will change your life is an alliance between conscious awareness and unconscious processes (your autonomic nervous system). I want you to walk away with ‘an appreciation between what does what best.’”
When I was in the second year of the MFA at Michigan, my mom and siblings flew out to attend my culminating poetry reading. The whole week saw spring rains, and it was too early in the season for the peony garden at the arboretum to be in bloom. Stir-crazy, at mom’s insistence, we drove to Dearborn to visit the Henry Ford Museum. We all parted ways upon arriving and meandered through the renovated airplane hangar, staring at American-historical things Ford had collected (examples include the Rosa Parks bus; the car in which JFK was assassinated; the chair in the theater where Lincoln was assassinated).
In an unpopulated corner of the open-plan museum I discovered a tiny desk, paired with a spindly chair, set onto a black platform. “Mahogany, pine, and birch,” read the sign. “Portable writing desk owned by Edgar Allan Poe, 1830-1849.”
I hadn’t thought about Poe in a long time. He was my first conscious poet love (Longfellow was unconscious (Mom read “Hiawatha” to me); I read “The Raven” for myself in elementary school). One of the best minds of my generation wrote her thesis on Eureka, the longform cosmic-scientific ‘prose poem’ in which Poe argues that matter and spirit are one, just as time and space are.
Peonies (Pfingstrosen) at the Brunnenmarkt (Vienna, 2017)
Spite stung me, during the Michigan and Berkeley years, when I would recommend or even give books away to people who would either not read them or fail to integrate their wisdom—as if I were able to detect such metabolization. It was a defensive gesture, an attempt to prevent these people from continually bringing me their problems and enabling the loops of suffering steering their own lives to spill out into mine in the course of our intimacy. I suppose I should have been more clear when I assigned the titles: this is homework.
I doubt everybody sees everything as homework the way that I used to. Furthermore, I doubt everyone sees homework as an honor, and as a pleasure, a duty to themselves and to the future of education, the way that I used to. I was a pretty weird kid now that I think about it. I always felt more comfortable at the teachers’ table at lunch, though I knew they weren’t sure they shouldn’t compel me to sit with the other kids. I learned later that a few reached out to my parents about my behaviors—slipping away to the bathroom during social studies to write in my diary, for example, or seeking refuge in the library during recess. Now that I know about Human Design, I can see why a 6/2 personality developed a strong desire for quiet, depopulated places: museums, libraries, peaceful natural settings; and why I have never been able to stay in touch with more than one true friend at a time.
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View a few blocks from the high school. As RC, a sailor, would say, “Love you to the horizon”
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And yet, we are never more self-conscious of our attachments than at the outset of Aquarius season.
“Wellness”-wise, in the Bay Area and beyond, we reek of cultural obsession with health, contagion, purgation (simultaneous para-Indigenous ritual purification and its Christianized sense of an exercise in purgatory), self-image, detoxification. . . This all seems like the superficial results of the “wellness” industry: diets (abused forms of dietas), self-hatred disguised as self-care of following restrictive, externally-imposed regimens of celebrity-endorsed nutrition and exercise. I want to say California is more culpable of this fervency than any other part of the world. The perfect spiritual identity here of inner beauty with outer beauty is the crux of the image-maintenance pudding-proof of the wellness industry: drugs, eating disorders, ceremonies of purification ripped from their contexts and repackaged as company-sponsored biohacks (kambo, ayahuasca), memberships to Soulcycle. Remember that the ritual use of ayahuasca for “healing” purposes was a nineteenth-century mestizo development: a direct (and mixed) response to the horrors of colonization. What Indigenous ‘aya’ users are trying to heal from is you, white man.
Easy enough to identify all this and castigate it. I wonder if my desire to be the kind of person who abjures Instagram proceeds from the same will-to-purity. I wonder if leaving the Bay Area would ameliorate some of this mental fixation. It doesn’t seem like I’d ever be rich enough to avoid all the shit that makes this place fucked up. And if I were to become brave enough to face it all, and strong enough, I still wouldn’t be rich enough to survive here with dignity and health.
I am always filled with dread when yet another acquaintance—usually a friend of a friend from college whose identity has been absorbed into their tech job— announces on their ‘socials’ that they are ‘taking a break’ from their ‘socials.’ If human consciousness is the final frontier of capitalism, and attention the new labor hour to be exploited by bossman, then this is a locally-popular form of righteous detox signaling that deserves some consideration.
Perhaps you remember that part in “The Social Network” documentary where the big handsome tech CEO is interviewed saying that he forbids his own children from using social media, and even most tech. Habit, dependency, degeneration: like nicotine, or sugar, what do we keep from the innocent?
“Rats leave a sinking ship.” What happens when the leaks being sprung are in the rat itself? Does the average tech worker know more than I know? Does taking a six-month break from Instagram adequately reset the brain’s hormone balance? Do you return after six months a stronger, fitter, better, happier Instagram user? Are you more resistant to the algorithm’s advertising after a break? Is that even the point? And is a pause in the use of an application equivalent to a detoxification? Are there analogies to be made between, for example, restrictive diets for people who are sensitive to glucose, or dairy, or caffeine?
It seems sketchy to trust ‘the science’ on this, considering how research is funded and by whom, just as it’s historically incomplete (and misguided) to talk about social media without addressing mind control as it would be to talk about LSD without addressing MKUltra.
West Cliff parking lot, Santa Cruz, 2020
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And yet. It’s hard for me to care deeply about this stuff. I don’t know how many people end up living in the Bay by accident, or incidentally, like me, and are then sucked into these realms and (true) conspiracy theories. One thinks: “If I experienced more genuine connection in my daily routine, I might not feel compelled to keep my Instagram account active.” “If I hadn’t moved eleven times in the past five years (due to poverty, pandemic), I might have more in-person friends with whom to experience said genuine connection.”
These circumstances are true for most people I know in my age range: lots of moving, not a lot of money, chronic stress. Conditions dare me not to feel cynical about the prospect of creating sustainable community; but then, I am not a tribal being as much as I am an individual (in Human Design circuitry, i.e.). Boosting that natural tendency to aloneness, at least 51% of any sense of emotional letdown or attachment to being seen and enveloped by others comes directly from my seven undefined centers. I trip on needing to do something to fulfill my destiny—how ironic. Mid-level awareness of choicelessness does not automatically disengage cycles of anxiety.
Someone I used to know, one of a lengthening roster of those who have transitioned out of the academy and into tech, posted a meme on Instagram a while ago. Superimposed in italics over a pastel image taken from “My Little Pony,” filling the screen, the text read, staying in academia is a trauma response. I was in the middle of deciding whether to move forward with the PhD program or not, and, #triggered, found this highly irritating and obnoxious. This person was a legacy graduate student themselves (both parents are PhD-holding, tenure-track professors) who had recently quit their elite humanities program. In that particular case, considering the personal history I knew about their challenging relationship to their parents, the text of the meme seemed justified. In my own case, not so much. I only have one parent who even finished college. When I saw that meme, I had been soaking in personal pressure, mysterious and powerful if not existentially dangerous, to complete what I had started at UCSC. I had been in therapy for about a year, and still felt mostly dumb and worthless. The notion that I was being judged, indeed, ‘victim-blamed,’ by a legacy academic for continuing to ‘pursue my dream’ rankled. Hadn’t I suffered?
In the months that followed, when the meme recurred at random in my inner monologue, I told myself that they must have needed to post that meme to attempt to rationalize their own decision to quit, and to lick their wound of that, and heal themselves. I wondered how deep the doubt ran, in academia or tech or anywhere. The sabbatical, for example, exists to give academics a chance to pretend they aren’t on the bureaucratic wheel of committees and teaching and administration samsara. Profound bitterness defines a high number of academics on every rung of the institutional hierarchy. And both industries encourage an infuriating ideological superiority in their mainstream subscribers: education and innovation, saving the world with how smarty smart we cleverly are, protected by layers of cynicism and pseudo-spiritual self-righteousness. No one can believe their own camp’s righteousness when they see ‘with eyes unclouded,’ as Ashitaka aspires to see (warrior hero in “Princess Mononoke”).
As the forest regenerates after apocalypse, Ashitaka bids farewell to San.
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Almost everyone flinches when they see for the first time how the sausage is made. Living in the Bay Area on the bleeding edge of this cryptocrap has tarnished the shine of my optimism; I see how corrosive the industry is to the personalness of people; there’s something so awkwardly vulnerable about California-based Millenials who have any core of compassion.
Relatedly, or not, re: turning on and dropping out, most of my friends (or old friends) have long since quit the academic game. I am playing it without playing, I flatter myself to think (and racing against a self-imposed clock, knowing I’ll have to ‘detox’ from the academy as soon as I birth a full draft of the dissertation). Bitterness is my enemy on these fronts, and I fight it as hard as I can. The battlefield (technoAcademe, say) is plain, stacked, exposed, and intrinsically hostile to free thinking. I have a few Yodas (my advisor, for one) who keep my eyes on my own paper where karma is concerned.
I used to berate myself for avoiding life by “hiding” in school; people tend to judge students that way, at least in the U.S., as if some realer world existed in the first place, and were separate from places of learning. “Yeah, but listen,” J interrupted me once amidst a rage against university machinery, corrupt unions, poverty, futility of engaged Scholastic idealism: “that’s the twist at the end of the movie: you’ve been facing the world this whole time.” Which is to say, in other words, I have not been avoiding my (‘realer’) homework. What a relief.